


Spiritual Union

by AbbeyWan



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Afterlife, Dick riding, M/M, Mentioned Marik Ishtar/Ryou Bakura, Nonviolent death, discussions of nonmonogamy, ego death blowjob, happy afterlife, weird afterlife sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 23:32:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14681778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AbbeyWan/pseuds/AbbeyWan
Summary: The dark spirit of the ring passed on after he failed to defeat the Pharaoh. Decades later, his partner in crime joins him.





	Spiritual Union

**Author's Note:**

> The soundtrack to this fic is Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica, if anyone's interested.

The King of Thieves, Bakhure, Devourer of the Sun, and Dark Spirit of the Ring slept on a hammock stretched in the shade between two massive date palms, on the banks of a river in Aaru. The river wasn’t the Nile, nor was it the Styx or the Sanzu; it was just a river. That was how life after was. Even Aaru was only Aaru because he expected it to be. Nobody minded when anybody else knew it to be somewhere else.

He was disturbed by a soft breeze carrying the scent of wild thistle. It told him who he would see when he opened his eyes, although in life the man had smelled of leather and lavender.

“Ryou?”

Bakhure rolled onto his side lazily, and matched his gaze with Malik Ishtar, “Do I look like him?”

Malik blinked a few times, shaking his head, “You always looked like him, it’s been too long since I’ve had to distinguish you.”

“I never looked like him, I just borrowed his body for a little while. Try again, Ishtar. You just have to look at _me,_ and not your memories.” To Bakhure Malik looked just as he should have – still rather youngish, with wild hair that suggested he’d found a way to let his darkness back in without giving himself over to it. He wore skinny jeans and a faded leather jacket that Bakhure suspected had become a second skin over the years.

Cautiously, Malik extended a hand towards Bakhure’s face, pausing before he could touch. His expression hardened, “It’s cruel. I loved him, and he’s gone now, and you’ve stolen his face.”

Bakhure turned away to watch the river. He heard Malik sink to his knees next to the hammock. “You’re the one who’s _gone_. He’ll join you eventually. Everyone comes to us eventually; it’s just a matter of waiting.”

The waiting got easier. Bakhure’s grandmother had waited three thousand years for ninety nine plus one souls to return home, and even she had been able to do it. Paradise was paradise, even without the ones you loved.

No sound came from the man behind him, so Bakhure bit his lip and kept talking. He was ever so good at filling silences with his own voice, “Rishid is here with the two nephews you lost, it wouldn’t be hard to find them. We talk sometimes. He only wanted to thank me for helping you before I died, but he’s not so bad. I didn’t realize he had it in him to grow a sense of humor, but I guess you Ishtars really did get better once the Pharaoh moved on. I’m glad.”

He waited for an acknowledgement that never came. An ibis stalked the shallows of the river. Her hunt was nearly silent as she probed at the water with the sickle of her beak. He didn’t understand how animals could eat or be eaten in the afterlife, but he didn’t bother to question it.

“Bakura Amane found me the first time I left my village. I stained my soul with the blood of her brother. You aren’t meant to force another mind to share space like I did. That could be the only reason you were drawn to me so quickly. I didn’t mean to trick you, I’m not as cruel as all that.” His voice pitched high, cracked, and gave out. Bakhure blamed it on dying young twice in a row.

_We shared something when our paths crossed, didn’t we? Is it too much to wonder if living would have led us down a path we could share?_

This was Malik’s time of grieving, and Bakhure was not so cruel as to steal it from him with his own petty concerns. “Was it your motorcycle?”

Malik responded to that one with a dry laugh, “No, I haven’t ridden that in years, Ryou made me give it up when we adopted Miku. No, I was- I was tired. I didn’t go to the doctor when Ryou told me to. I guess I just didn’t think it was that bad, and when I finally did go it was a lot worse than it could have been.”

“There’s worse ways to go.”

“I hated for them to see it, but I couldn’t be alone. Ryou had to- I wouldn’t let go-“ He sobbed, Bakhure dropped a hand and it found Malik’s hair. He was gentle as he brushed his fingers through strands too thick and golden to be at all the hair Malik had died with. His comfort was brushed aside far too soon as the man recovered, “I can’t believe you laughed your way into death twice without caring.”

“You’re no coward. I screamed at the last moment, when everything fell apart and I couldn’t be forced to make any more moves - when Necrophades abandoned me.”

“I guess even a demon doesn’t want to die alone.”

His hand still hung limp where Malik had left it. “I was never anything other than human. Good at playing a role, but human.”

Bakhure fell back and watched the sky. The day was slowly fading, and soon he would be able to pick out the first stars. Not until he awoke in Aaru had he realized how few stars were left in modern Japan, and how much he had missed the vast starscape of his youth.

“How long do I have to wait until I see them again?”

It made Bakhure smile, but he was polite enough to not laugh. “Do you want them to die young? It’s been forty years since we last spoke, and I doubt you think that was enough time.”

It was too long, and still not enough for Bakhure to prepare. The first pretty boy to ever snag his heart as much as his eye in three thousand years of existence, and no time to confront those feelings before pushing his own ragged soul straight into true death.

His mother and father had wept into each other’s shoulders when they found him. They wept and pulled at his robes and assured him the pain had been worth it. It didn’t matter that Ma’at only graded on effort, that their worst enemy had seen them through after Bakhure’s failure, not when they were finally together again. His sister had lifted and swung him like he weighed nothing, his grandmother had scolded him for making her worry, and all of Kul Elna had come to him to praise the child who had forced himself to remember them longer than stone could have held their names.

Out of the ninety nine plus one souls finally pulled over, Bakhure was the only one who missed a person still living, and he had no proof that person cared to mourn his pathetic and well deserved death.

“The waiting feels like nothing at all, everything is at peace here. You’ll wish you could share it with them, but it all goes on forever and so someday you will.”

_There_ was the first star, Venus really, and Bakhure had never questioned how the stars and planets of earth came to be the same ones projected in the sky in the hereafter.

“ _Oh_.” There was a soft sort of shock in Malik’s voice, and Bakhure was startled when suddenly he was leaning down over him, interrupting his view of the sky. “You- you glow. You don’t look like him at all, do you?”

Every person in his village had come and touched his hair the first night he spent in Aaru. He hadn’t even noticed it yet, and it was nothing he could control. Diabound had accepted the rage and prayers of a slaughtered village into itself, and now that his Ka and Ba were one its light shone out where it could. Hair and eyes and long trails of pale scar tissue, gently glowing like the moon when seen from the proper angles, like some trick of the light.

“No, I don’t. Some things recycle, and he has a lot of my components, but we were never quite the same.” Bakhure closed his eyes as the hand he knew to expect reached again towards his face, but it didn’t stop in his hair like so many other hands had. He should have expected as much from Malik Ishtar, _scars_ were the thread that wove his tragedy. It was too close to a lover’s touch, the way Malik ran his fingers down the thick line of scar under the eye Bakhure had almost lost, and he couldn’t help but sigh and lean into it just a touch.

“Who stitched this shut for you? They ruined half your face doing it.”

Bakhure laughed, loud and reckless and full of wounds that would never heal. “I did it myself drunk on wine when I was thirteen years old, and then I packed mud and honey over it and prayed to Set he wouldn’t take my eye like he had Horus.”

Malik didn’t flinch away. He pulled at the flesh of Bakhure’s face a moment longer and then moved down to the thick cut in his lower lip. Bakhure relaxed and let him pull at it before providing context, “Nine. A merchant wanted my tongue for what I’d said to him when he caught me stealing, and he nearly got it.”

“Nearly.” Malik giggled, “You _would_ offend someone so much he’d want your tongue when he could have your hands.”

_Do you want them both?_

Bakhure held up a hand and showed him a nasty little knot of scarring between his thumb and forefinger, “This is where I pulled the knife out of his hands by the blade. I summoned Diabound. He died.”

_He died_ , never _I killed him_.  Not that particular man.

“Ryou had exercises for the hole you put through his hand to keep it from getting stiff.” He said it casually, and Bakhure understood. Malik had done more than enough regrettable shit in his life, he wasn’t angry for what Bakhure had done while trying to keep his host in check.

Malik took his hand just as Bakhure had worried he might, and rolled the sleeve of his robes down to follow the confetti of streaks crisscrossing the back of his wrist. “Self-defense?”

“No points for that guess, those ones are easy.”

He didn’t stop Malik from pulling his robes open and examining his chest. “You don’t have the same scars from using the ring.”

“I owned it fully and embraced the darkness when it asked me to. Ryou’s experience was always a struggle by comparison.” Bakhure struggled up into a sitting position and pulled his robes off entirely. He allowed Malik to turn him fully away and bend his head down to look at the long raised lines across his back.  

“Whip?”

“I wasn’t born a king of thieves.”

“Rishid has scars like that.”

“We’ve shared stories, actually.” Rishid preferred Bakhure’s stories of being whipped for being a wild thief of a child, and Bakhure didn’t mind romanticizing his freedom while recalling stories of stolen bread. “No word on whether your father made it through, he’s never seen him.”

Malik’s fingers moved almost reverently along the marks. Bakhure silently tolerated the shivers it sent down his spine. “It’s okay. Ryou and I had a lot of conversations after Miku. It wasn’t just the initiation, it went deeper. Rishid was a better father than he could ever be, it doesn’t matter how he got that way.”

“Did you end up looking much like him? I took after my mother for the most part, but he says Isis was the one who looked most like yours.”

“Not enough to bother me. I shaved.”

Malik didn’t see himself much older than thirty, and Bakhure assumed it was the point he’d started to really resemble his father. He didn’t feel the need to challenge the statement, however. Bakhure’s own sense of age was warped by two young deaths and three thousand years of sleep, people struggled to put an age to his appearance in Aaru. Events had transpired such that Bakhure and Malik had both been teenagers once, on the verge of feeling something together, and in that sense Bakhure had always allowed that his clock was synched to his host and Malik.

He knew a little from Rishid and his sons, but Bakhure had always been curious, “So. Ryou?”

Malik stopped touching his back and nudged Bakhure to the side so that he could join him in sitting on the hammock. “Physically his body was attractive when it was either of you. I had to confront that aspect first. Plenty of other men looked good too once I started to pay attention, but he was the first and I guess you could say it lasted the rest of my life.”

They had _nearly_ kissed once during their short partnership, in an adrenal blaze of confusing impulse and instinct. Bakhure had been sure, but Malik hadn’t, and they’d brushed it off.

“We shared a lot of traumas, and once we started spending time together we started to create a lot of happy memories to share too, and it just fell together naturally after that. One morning we woke up and we were living together and no different from any other couple. We knew we wanted a family together, and things just moved from there.”

Bakhure didn’t have much to compare it with, “There was a boy who dyed cloth that I used to let kiss me. I didn’t like his laugh or his teeth or the way he talked about the people like me who slept on the street. He smelled nice under the dye though, and his eyes were a pretty amber. He’s here, with the man he lived his life with. I imagine it’s nice. To have that with somebody.”

Bakhure never went to anyone or anyplace to sleep, he just existed where he was at in the after. Sometimes he would imagine it, though. A small home to always go back to with somebody else who always came back there too. More often than not he imagined that person was Malik, but it wasn’t his place to say so.

And yes. In the long, warm nights he would sometimes imagine Malik: wild, cruel, free, gold all over, leaning over him and taking everything and giving it back just as hard.

Malik sighed and pulled his legs up to hug them against his body, “It is nice, it’s so much nicer than anything I knew when I met you. This is hard, Bakura, I miss him now as much as I missed you then.”

He could teach Malik the just slightly different pronunciation of his name later. It didn’t matter. “I can’t make any decisions for you, Malik. It isn’t unusual to love more than one person here. People have to move on when lovers die before they do, and people find those they lost too soon when they cross over. You can wait for Ryou, but I’m here now and I never had a chance for my feelings to change, that’s not how things work here. He was nothing but a host to me, but if you loved him I can learn to share the way people share here. Nobody can change the nature of death, and it’s hard to be jealous after such separation.”

He didn’t want to look at Malik, but Malik was looking at him, looking _into_ him more than he had this whole time, and in the end Bakhure lost the battle and met his gaze.

“It was you, too, not just the fact that you wore his body for a while. We were both made of cruelty and pain back then, but there was a purpose behind it, right? You saw my purpose and I saw yours, right?”

Gods, why was every emotion so raw and easy to name after death? Bakhure wished he could run from it the way he had been able to that one time they’d come close to such a breakthrough in life.

The heart he didn’t even have anymore was racing, and it terrified him, but Bakhure couldn’t look away. He simply agreed, “We wanted the same man dead, but I loved you for the reasons you wanted him dead, not just that you wanted to kill him.”

The thing about existing in Aaru was it was much easier to do things exactly the way you intended to, and intention could align things better than action alone ever could in life. Bakhure’s first time kissing Malik Ishtar was not only better than any kiss he’d shared with the dyer, it was quite literally exactly what he’d always wanted. He could read what Malik wanted from him because Malik wanted him to, and he knew the same was true in reverse.

Malik pushed hard on his shoulders, and Bakhure fell back with grace. Malik was still thinking, still probing what exactly this was, but Bakhure was loose and open and willing to give him whatever he needed.

Bakhure arched back as Malik moved down to suck at the pulse in his throat. There was heat, more heat than could have passed between them in life. Malik was like fire and gold, a beautiful mirror to everything that had broken Bakhure to begin with. It was balance – Bakhure was deep scars and darkness in Malik’s eyes.

Malik’s weight began to shift as he allowed himself to find support against Bakhure. He threaded one hand into thick white hair, and allowed the other to begin travelling down the bare skin of Bakhure’s side.

“Whatever you want, I don’t know how it’s done anyways.” It wasn’t necessary; Malik could read it just as easily without words, but it seemed right to say it out loud.

Malik laughed and pulled back to look at him. “Two lives and forty years of afterlife?”

“I’m disagreeable.” He looped his arms up over Malik’s head and pulled him back down for more kissing.

With a few more readjustments they lay stacked on the hammock, Bakhure’s spread legs framing Malik’s as they slowly ground against one another. Malik’s fingers meandered further, down over Bakhure’s hip and then thigh, before hooking under the bottom of his shenti and pushing back up until it barely covered anything at all. His nails dug into the flesh of Bakhure’s bare ass with just the right kind of pressure, causing him to squeak in surprise and buck up hard against Malik.

Malik sat up, wild hair falling beautifully around his face as he did so, “Ryou always liked that too.” He worked his jacket and shirt off, but got caught off balance trying to pull at his own belt. Bakhure giggled and caught him before he could upset the entire hammock, and sprung up to squat in the earth in front of him. Malik looked down at him a little sheepishly, but Bakhure rested his face against Malik’s knee and smirked up, waiting for him to continue.

“Prick.”

“That _is_ what I’m waiting for.”

Malik rolled his eyes and finally got the belt off. Bakhure shifted so that he sat comfortably on his knees, face and arms resting between Malik’s thighs. He gave a saucy wink, and Malik laughed as he unzipped, “What are you planning down there?”

He smiled, vague and evasive. He knew Malik still lacked context beyond Ryou’s near-identical name. “Living up to my namesake.”

“Nightmare-eater?” Malik screwed his face up in thought as he pushed his boxers out of the way, finally getting his erection free.

“Sun-eater. God-eater.” He didn’t give Malik any time to react before pushing himself forward and licking up his shaft. Bakhure had wanted this, with anyone in a vague sense, and with Malik in his most vivid dreams, for such a long time. He didn’t really know what he was doing, but he _wanted_ to know, and he could admit to a few experiments on his own fingers late at night while trying to make sense of it.

Malik hummed in appreciation as he worked, but it was obvious Bakhure wasn’t exactly blowing his mind. It wasn’t like kissing, where their intent could merge on one shared goal and lead him through it. This act was a gift to Malik, an unrehearsed monologue, a game Bakhure had decided to play despite the stacked odds. He grunted in frustration, but closed his eyes and tried to focus on the main advantage he had over Ryou’s forty years of marital experience.  

Bakhure was dead, and he couldn’t _really_ gag or suffocate. There wasn’t anything to be afraid of if he just pushed himself onward. Malik was bigger than Bakhure, but he couldn’t be all that big in the scheme of things. People did this all the time. He relaxed, and worked slowly so that he could get used to the feeling of hot skin in his mouth.

He wrapped his hand around the base and considered everything that was familiar territory. He was an _expert_ when it came to jerking himself off.

He pushed his tongue down between the head and foreskin just like he liked to do with his thumb, and felt a bright wave of euphoria roll off of Malik. Bakhure sighed in satisfaction at that, and started to experiment with bobbing and sucking while repeating the motion.

“Ry- ah, Bakura!” Malik grabbed at his hair while Bakhure sputtered in surprise. He couldn’t get offended, it had been Ryou for _decades_. Malik’s hips jerked as a bright need poured off of him. It was easy to get lost in the feel of it, Bakhure let his awareness be reduced to Malik’s quiet gasps and muttering, the hands in his hair, and the pleasant feedback humming through his own nerves. He moved intuitively now, completely open to Malik’s desire, possessed by an overbearing need to _let him in_.

With a quiet whine and a hard tug, Malik peaked and poured bright and hot into Bakhure. He folded forward and caught his breath with his face buried in Bakhure’s hair. Bakhure readjusted, wrapping his arms around Malik’s calves and turning his head to rest comfortably against his lap.

Aftershocks kept rolling through Bakhure as he tried to regain his bearings. Malik recovered first, and pulled Bakhure up so that he lay curled on top of him.

“I-”

Bakhure shook his head and nuzzled against Malik’s throat. He was aware of the hot tears leaking down his face, but all he felt was joy.

Malik ran his nails up and down Bakhure’s back as they half-dozed. It was full dark now, and everything was lacquered silver by the light of the moon. Malik’s face was bathed in a similar glow by his proximity to Bakhure. A chorus of frogs croaked from the river over the quiet buzz of crickets.

“Do you think Ryou will glow like that because of you?” The words blew pleasantly through Bakhure’s hair as Malik broke the silence.

“I think he has to, right?”

“I didn’t mean to call you Ryou. You’re not a replacement.”

Bakhure laughed. “I don’t think this would have worked if I was.”

“Will you mind him, when he dies too?” Malik’s grip was tight, he was worried Bakhure might change his mind and run.

“You know better than anyone how much of me is in him. He wasn’t my host by accident. I could have loved him, if I hadn’t needed to use him to complete my work so badly.”

Bakhure heaved himself up to straddle Malik, resting his forehead against Malik’s and rubbing their noses together. “My name is _Bakhure_ , I’m greedy. I _want_ the refuse of my soul named _Bakura,_ and I want the joy of thing you both had together.”

Malik raked his nails harder, now with both hands, “You know I’m just as self-centered, I want the full set. Ryou’s a freak who loves being loved more than anything else; I don’t think he’ll mind the idea.”

Bakhure kissed him and slid a hand down to stroke Malik’s dick hard again. Startled, Malik responded by grabbing at his ass and bucking up against him.

After only a few short thrusts of his hips he butted their heads together to get Bakhure to back up, “How do you get lube around here?”

“Malik. We only have bodies because we know what having a body feels like. I’m pretty sure wanting you in my ass is all it takes.”

Malik frowned and hiked up against Bakhure again, “Huh. I guess.”

He didn’t seem satisfied, so Bakhure let go of him as he ground down and waited for him to say more.

“I really like doing it, though.”

Bakhure laughed, and reached down under the hammock, groping over the ground for a moment. “Well, we could also just happen to say we thought about that and had this waiting ahead of time, right?”

He handed Malik a bottle of oil that _definitely had been there the whole time, promise_.

Such cheesy sleight of hand was worth the delighted giggle from Malik, and the hard round of kisses that followed. When he was done, Malik fell back to coat his fingers in oil.

He ran a finger up and down the crack of Bakhure’s ass with a deliberate slowness. Bakhure shivered and hitched down on them each time Malik brushed over his entrance, but he took his time and refused to stop moving until he was well saturated. When he was satisfied with the mess he was making, Malik’s fingers retreated so he could cover them in more oil, and then returned with shorter strokes, finally reducing them to firm little circles against Bakhure’s hole.

Each spasm of muscle sent another warm bolt of pleasure though Bakhure, and he finally reached back in frustration to grab at Malik’s wrist and try to force a finger in. Malik giggled, but allowed his middle finger to push up to the first knuckle. Bakhure sighed at the pressure, dropping his mouth down to suck at Malik’s shoulder.

Malik pushed in slowly, carefully, circling his finger and letting Bakhure’s muscles spasm and adjust for each millimeter, until he had worked the entire digit into him. He pushed a second against the rim until he could slide the tip of it in as well, and then pulled them both out to get more oil.

“Ah,” Bakhure blinked in surprise at the satisfaction of feeling them slide _out,_ the loss of the annoying pressure was just as pleasant as the pressure itself.

As Malik worked back in with two fingers, Bakhure began to understand why he would like this so much. Malik had almost total command of his attention with each small movement of his fingers, and as he worked he was forcing Bakhure’s body to accept his will above its own. Bakhure bit down hard as he laughed, willing himself to open up again.

“Malik.”

“Yes?”

“Give me the rod already.”

Malik groaned, pulling his fingers out to spank him with the same hand. Bakhure yelped, delighted, and spread his knees a little wider. Malik rolled his eyes, but he helped guide Bakhure down onto his dick anyways.

Sitting up, Bakhure swiveled his hips and clenched his ass a few times, testing the feeling out. He felt hot stuffed around Malik’s girth, and every little movement against the pressure was delightful. Sharp needful static ran through his veins as he rose up once. Lowered down again. The movement was slick and made him shiver a little, and he loved the way Malik looked back up into his eyes even as his neck arched back.

Bakhure flexed his abdominal muscles and repeated the movement again, and again after that, until he fell into an easy pattern. He braced himself with one hand on Malik’s shoulder, and drew little nonsense lines across Malik’s broad chest with the other. His short hair fell into his face and he started breathing heavier, thighs tensing as he rode down harder with each cycle of his hips.

Malik dug his nails deeper into the meat of his ass, and Bakhure let Malik pull him down harder as he started to thrust back up into him. His hips strained from the motions he was putting them through, and Bakhure thanked the gods he’d been keeping up with his meditative stretches because he did _not_ want to let up even a little.

Just as he began to open up to the same pleasurable feeling rolling up off of Malik as before, Malik grabbed Bakhure’s dick and started jerking it. Bakhure moaned long and loud, and fucked hard down onto him.

Every breath was another high moan as he felt Malik’s energy shift towards giving him everything he needed. He accepted it greedily, used all that was Malik to climb, until he yelped out a hard orgasm and released all over Malik’s front and his own hands.

Exhausted, Bakhure squeezed hard around his partner and moved the few more moments it took to feel him tense and finish.

He didn’t care that he collapsed into a puddle of his own spunk, Malik still soft inside him. Bakhure pulled him close and moaned stupid into Maliks hair, shaking and satisfied and too tired to give a shit what kind of wreck he probably looked.

Bakhure recovered as he felt Malik thread his fingers through his over the back of his hand. He watched lazily as Malik pulled his arm up and licked his wrist clean for him. Oh, that meant they’d each swallowed a bit of the other, didn’t it?

“I missed you, Malik.”

“I know. I missed you too, Bakhure.”


End file.
